Political skills are becoming a hot commodity on the tech talent market.
That’s according to LinkedIn’s monthly workforce report for October. The business-oriented social network says tech companies and NGOs are the top employers hiring people with politics skills in Seattle, New York, and the San Francisco Bay Area. LinkedIn defines “politics skills” as “grassroots organizing, elections, and political campaigns to international relations, political communication, and economic development.”
It’s not hard to see why big tech companies are keeping their eyes peeled for candidates with political skills. The tech industry is under intense scrutiny from the federal government for providing foreign actors a new avenue of influence in U.S. politics — a dynamic that came to a head during this week’s Congressional hearings. Lawyers from Facebook, Google, and Twitter were grilled by various House and Senate committees on the role the played in Russian election interference and their responsibility to police political discourse.
The LinkedIn report also shows Seattle gaining the most workers in the past year of any big metro region in the country. For every 10,000 LinkedIn members in Seattle, 67.2 arrived within the last year, and 9.26 of them came from the San Francisco Bay Area.
LinkedIn’s report doesn’t dive deep into details on the growing demand for political skills in tech but says it “is a trend we’re keeping an eye on.”
See the full October LinkedIn workforce report here and the Seattle report here.
